Professor of Political Science, specializes in comparative political parties and elections in established and new democracies, comparative public policy/political economy, and 20th century social theory. In the 1980s and 1990s, he authored three books in German about comparative industrial and technology policy and related social movements, with condensed English journal articles summarizing some of the findings. His next run of research projects dealt with party system changes in established Western democracies, resulting in a set of articles and books such as The Logics of Party Formation, (Cornell University Press 1989), Beyond the European Left, (Duke University Press, 1990), The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1994) and The Radical Right in Western Europe, (in collaboration with Anthony J. McGann, Michigan University Press, 1995). The latter received the American Politicial Science Association's 1996 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. In the 1990s and 2000s, Kitschelt conducted several empirical research projects on the emergence of party systems in postcommunist Eastern Europe and in Latin America, with the most comprehensive accounts published as co-authored books: Post-Communist Party Systems. Competition, Representation and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 1999, co-authored with Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski and Gabor Toka); Latin American Party Systems (Cambridge University Press, 2010, co-authored with Kirk Hawkins, Juan Pablo Luna, Guillermo Rosas, and Elizabeth Zechmeister).

Kitschelt received the 2000 Franklin L Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for best paper presented at the 1999 APSA Annual Meeting. In 2002, he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS).

Kitschelt published journal articles and contributions to edited volumes on questions of comparative political economy of advanced capitalism, most notably in Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks and John Stephens, Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Pablo Beramendi, Silja Häusermann, Herbert Kitschelt and Hans-Peter Kriesi, The Politics of Advanced Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Since the late 2000s, Kitschelt has two ongoing projects, in part documented in a number of journal articles, but intended to result in capstone book publications. First, he initiated a global comparison of citizen-politician linkage mechanisms in democracies, with a focus on explaining the rise and decline of clientelistic politics. An early publication leading into this project is a book co-edited with Steven Wilkinson, Patron, Clients or Policies? Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition (Cambridge University Press, 2007), followed by an 88-country data collection effort on linkage mechanisms documented in and publicly downloadable from the Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project website at http://sites.duke.edu/democracylinkage . Second, he is working on a renewed effort to map and account for the transformation of political party systems in postindustrial democracies, primarily in collaboration with Philipp Rehm (Ohio State University).